Music technology never fails to amaze me
This isn't exactly about MuseScore, but I didn't really know where else to put it. Could we have a form for just talking about other musical interests and such?
Anyway, I for one have always been a huge critic of synthesized music. While many instruments sound great on synth (woodwinds and brass seem to lend them selves particularly well), but strings always were the giveaway for me. While looking around and various synths, mostly just for the amusement of seeing just how good a synth you can get, I came across this beauty.
http://www.youtube.com/watch#playnext=1&playnext_from=TL&videos=EDnOSfG…
After hearing that, I was literally speechless. I honestly don't know if I would have been able to say for certain that it wasn't a real performance if I hadn't known ahead of time that it was all synth. Maybe in 20 something years from now, our wonderful little musescore will have sounds like that. lol Hey, it never hurts to dream.
Comments
Oh yes, it is amazing! In some examples, you can hear the hair 'scratching' or the bow wood. Articulation is definitely better than anything I have heard so far (which might be not very far...).
OTOH, it's half a terabyte of patches with a 4-digit figure as price (which is still less than renting a real orchestra anyway!). It is also obviously geared toward the large, late Romantic orchestra; very difficult to do, say, Bach with it, I'm afraid; for that we'll probably need another half terabyte of patches (and much more work on the articulation side). So, not for the hobbist, right now. But it IS impressing and promising for the future.
Do you know the Garritan Personal Orchestra? Also promising; look at //www.garritan.com/products_gpo4.html for some samples (Dvořak's one is particularly impressive; leave the Flash plugin time to load the sample to avoid breaks).
Thanks for pointing to it!
M.
P.S.: while I agree than brasses tend to be better in many case, I'm not so fond of most woodwinds you can hear: too much 'plastic'... ;-) .
In reply to Oh yes, it is amazing! In by Miwarre
What amazed me the most about that demo was unlike most synth music, which tends to be somewhat flatish sounding, I actually felt like I was standing in the middle of the string section of a live orchestra. As for woodwinds, I was more talking about flute than the others. I don't hear live oboes enough to have a great feel of what they should sound like. ;-) I actually have the version of Garitan that comes with Finale. While the sounds aren't nearly as impressive as those by EastWest (I've been drooling over them ever since I heard a few demos lol), they're quite good. TBH, when you consider the price of other "professional" programs in other professions, such as atuo cad ($5,000 ish), or photoshop (over $1,000) the price of these really high end synths isn't all that bad.
Does anyone here know if it would be possible to have MuseScore compatible with synths such as Garritan, or EastWest? (if it already isn't)
On a side note, the one issue that I think really needs the most work on MuseScore is it's playback abilities. While I like to write stuff in MuseScore more than Finale, it's somewhat lacking in it's ability to play back the music. Granted, for it's main goal (to write/edit/print music) it does it quite well. I just wish it would start heading more in the direction of programs like Finale with their to play music "musically". Still, I still stand by it being the best free music program out there. Can't wait to watch it develop more and more over the next few years. :-)
In reply to What amazed me the most about by Michael M
I got Garritan Personal Orchestra to work with MuseScore 1.0 on Windows XP without VST, using Jack MIDI and Loopbe1 for sending MIDI directory to GPO's Aria Player. Has anyone else gotten this to work? The performance is a bit uneven, and I'm wondering if anyone has suggestions to improve it.
Thanks.